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Fantasy. Fiction. HTML: The novel that inspired Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides On Stranger Tides is Tim Powers' great Disneyland ride through pirates, puppeteers, treasure, and thrill-a-minute action that carries on from the start. It follows the exploits of John "Jack Shandy" Chandagnac, who travels to the new world after the death of his puppeteer father to confront his uncle, who has apparently made off with the family fortune. During the voyage, he befriends Beth Hurwood and her father Benjamin Hurwood, an Oxford professor. Before they arrive at their destination, their ship is waylaid by Blackbeard and his band of pirates. With the help of the professor and his assistant, the captain is killed and Chandagnac is pressed into piracy and sorcery as Blackbeard searches for the Fountain of Lost Youth. Chandagnac, newly dubbed "Jack Shandy," must stop the evil plot and save Beth..… (more)
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And, yes, I loved this book. I am not claiming that it is perfect. In fact, Tim Powers does not write perfect books, but that always seems to be part of the charm. Sometimes he leaves you breathless with the pace of action, sometimes puzzled because a piece seems to be missing, until of course you stumble across it in the next chapter and realize that the book was just taunting you... but here's the key: you are always engaged.
This particular novel engages the reader in piracy, in fact. Interestingly enough, though the novel "suggested" the fourth installment of the tired "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, it is not at all the bloodless, artless affair the film depicts. In fact, by "suggested" apparently the Disney folks mean that the book and the film have exactly one character and one plot point in common. Never judge a book by its loosely-affiliated movie. The book is much more interesting, much more adventurous. All that is exactly as it should be, because this is a Tim Powers book.
Naturally, our protagonist, the unintentionally piratical Jack Shandy, roams all over the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico encountering not only pirates, but also vodun/voodoo and the sometimes awful and sometimes miraculous magic that it produces. Jack's multiple antagonists are, in fact, almost all practitioners of this mysterious art, which makes things tough for a former puppeteer. Yes, you read that correctly. Jack was raised as a traveling puppeteer. Not the sort of background one sees every day, even in a fictional character, but that is another wonderful element of a Tim Powers novel -- they are all deeply odd, in one way or another.
With the pirates -- some of whom are the stuff of legend, like Blackbeard, and some of whom are purely invented creatures -- Powers has the room to play broadly with peculiarity. The result is a novel that artfully balances authentic emotion and sometimes disturbing violence, including some gruesome death and reanimation sequences, with a wry humor that never carries one too far over the top. Powers also has a talent for descriptions that -- with similar balance -- create a rich, real visual but don't distract from the movement of the story.
There is a genuine pleasure in a book like this, one that offers so much, stitched together so well. The stitches may show in places, but this is the sort of book that becomes an old friend -- the kind of friend who wears old clothes comfortably and walks around in scuffed shoes, but always takes you on the best adventures.
The story is clearly Powers's own take on immortal pirates and ships crewed by the dead. Jack Shandy must transform himself from mild-mannered puppeteer to pirate to voodoo magician to thwart powerful pirates and sorcerers seeking immortality. Jack's motivations are a little muddy. He may be doing it to thwart evil, to save the love of his life (though he hardly knows her), or to get revenge on the uncle who betrayed his father. Mostly the motives don't matter that much. Jack just moves from plot point to plot point.
It seems at times that the story suffers from an excess of antagonists: Blackbeard, Benjamin Hurwood, Leo Friend, the thieving uncle. Certainly a substantial cast and the eventual downfall of evil as the evildoers turn on one another is not uncommon in a Powers story, but at 326 pages On Stranger Tides just doesn't have room for all of them. In later, longer books all the stories and sub-plots have a little more time and space to play out.
All in all it is a fun book, and if you like Powers or you like swashbucklers, you'll probably enjoy this one.
Powers takes well documented actual facts, such as Blackbeard wearing smouldering fuzes
Well worth the read, and some fascinating ideas come out of the fusion, deftly handled as you would expect from the author of other books that do similar things such as "The Stress of her Regard" and "The Anubis Gates." Absolutely well worth it, and not a long read - it's too likely to make you not put it down for that!
But OST is much more than a cobbled together version of a Disney ride. Powers has created a swashbuckling epic, and has enough ideas for any three other novels. There's epic sea battles, drunken sailors, some
Powers has a fantastic imagination, and the skill to get it all onto the page. I'm in awe of his talent.
Tim Powers is a great
The interweaving of the story's many threads brings you to a satisfying, open-ended conclusion... for now...
There are a number of issues with the specifics of the book too. A Spanish Conquistador of that era would not be talking about atoms, and a European puppeteer certainly wouldn't have understood such talk. Let alone the previously deranged man having a long convenient multi-page period of lucidity when he explains in detail how to stop the main enemies. There was another key moment of the plot in which a gunshot is fired rather improbably in order to set up a particular outcome.
The protagonist also seems to have a quite remarkable ability to learn new skills, apparently becoming an expert pirate on land in something like three weeks, and a master of sailing a pirate ship in 5 hours.
It's a nice mashup of some different ideas, but it would benefit from being shorter with better defined characters, rather than in the end a definitely dramatic but almost clockwork-like closing of all the plot arcs.
It's a well written book though, and it must have fans that swear by it. The same book that enchants others made me despair. I wish I could get any inkling what I'm missing. But despite the fact that I read every single word of this doomed book, I'll never know. Now, to the next book!
In place of Elizabeth Swann, Will Turner, and Cap'n Jack Sparrow, there is puppet-maker John Chandagnac. If he has any movie equivalent he'd take the place of Bootstrap Turner in the often spoken about backstory.
Along the crossing of the ocean, John Chandagnac's ship is attacked by pirates. Turns out these pirates are cursed and are now ZOMBIES. So this is basically the story of how John takes inventory of his life and decides being part of a cursed pirate ship might be more rewarding that working with puppets.
When John Chandagnac steps aboard ship, he little realizes how much his life will change. As he sets out on a voyage of revenge to restore the fortune that his uncle absconded with, he is soon distracted by the beautiful Elizabeth Hurwood. John begins to sense that something is wrong: Elizabeth is oddly listless, thoroughly controlled by her eccentric father and overbearing doctor. Already conflicted by his interest for the girl, John's life irrevocably alters when pirates attack and take the ship. John's brave and rather idiotic actions during the attack lead to him being offered The Choice: join the pirates or die. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valour, John joins the crew as Jack Shandy. Now a pirate, he discovers that the New World is full of mystery, danger, and literal magic. Beth's father and the fearsome Blackbeard have concocted a horrifying scheme involving powerful Voduun magic and blood sacrifice. Jack, torn between his sense of honour and loyalty, sets himself a new goal: to protect and rescue Beth. The story hits climax after climax, and sorcery and swordfights abound.
Considering that the male lead's name is Jack, the female's is Elizabeth, pirates are after a hidden treasure, blood sacrifices are central to the plot, and undead pirates end up battling aboard ship, comparisons with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl are pretty much unavoidable*. My issue with the story was the same as the one I had with Pirates of the Caribbean. The very mechanics of the plot meant I could not examine the contents too closely. I have a somewhat inflexible moral compass, and one little thought kept slipping into my head: that a man who pillages and murders, no matter how affable he might be, is not a good guy. The narration appears to cast the "good" pirates as neutral and Shandy as heroic and noble, and like Will Turner in Pirates, neither Shandy nor the narrator reflect much on what it means to join, aid, and be loyal to the pirate crew. I didn't like Will much, and Shandy really, really reminds me of him, with his self-righteous arrogance and his overarching obsession with a woman that we've only seen him speak a few words to. However, morality has little to do with likeability, and like Shandy, I find the pirate captain, Davies, to be an incredibly engaging and enjoyable character. He reminds me of Barbossa, my absolute favourite character of Pirates, but he has an even more wicked sense of humour. I couldn't really empathize with any of the characters, but I liked most of them. I also loved the characterization of Blackbeard as incredibly cold, scary, smart, and charismatic.
The only aspect I think the movie got better was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Hurwood has the worst case of the damsels I think I've ever come across. She spends the entire book as someone's hostage, and her personality remains entirely undeveloped. I think all of her words together might fit on one page, and they are all reactions to circumstance and declarations of affection or fear. She is explicitly considered by the men around her to be merely an object, a vessel to be utilized for the pleasure or convenience of others. The story also uses the "weepy weakling woman threatened with rape" trope way too much and way too graphically for me to be happy. Since Elizabeth appears to have been born with the backbone of a jellyfish and other forces continually use multiple means to control and subdue her, she is little more than a blank-eyed doll, and is actually described as such at several points in the story.
The fight scenes are pulse-racing and oddly realistic, considering most of them involve spells cast by Bokur (Vodou witch-doctors) and zombies joining in the fun. They actually forced me to realize that although I have a fascination with the grotesque, I have an incredibly weak stomach for the gruesome. I never really realized just how wimpy I was until some of the graphic fight scenes in the story. Guhhhk.
My favourite aspect of the story was the way that it intertwined the history and myths of the region. Powers definitely did the research. His New World is vivid and enjoyable, and Powers never rewrites history, something I really appreciate. He adds carefully engineered additional details which not only fit with all the known facts but feel both fitting and creative. For example, in this story, Blackbeard is a Vodun Bokur, which explains some of his fantastic adventures and odd foibles. Other fantastic stories, from Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth to iron's effect on magic, are deftly woven into the tale. Overall, On Stranger Tides is a perfect read for anyone who likes quite a bit of blood, gore, and battle, enjoyed the lurid tales of The Pirate's Own Book, and wants a better-crafted rendition of Pirates of the Caribbean. Bizarre and fantastic, in this book, you're off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be monsters.
*I'm comparing On Stranger Tides solely to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl; apparently a later Pirates movie was directly based on On Stranger Tides, but I didn't get that far in the Pirates franchise.
A while back I picked up On Stranger Tides. I had heard that it would be the template for the next installment in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (#4) and because I'm such a huge fan (not, really). It was a whim, one I thought that would pass after just a few pages,
Boy, was I wrong.
Within just the first couple pages, John Chandagnac has been captured by pirates, stabbed and nearly killed the pirate captain, and been "invited" to either join the pirate crew or, proverbially speaking, to walk the plank.
"Adopt our purposes as your own," the bleeding pirate tells him, or die "where you stand." Pretty standard pirate fare, right?
The plot only gets weird from there. But I shouldn't be surprised, right? Because we're talking pirates, right?
Before he knows it, Chandagnac, or Jack Shandy as he is dubbed by his new crew, is plotting his escape back to respectability and lawful society, hoping to take with him the lovely, and also kidnapped, Beth Hurwood. Just as he's about to effect his escape, he finds himself, unwittingly, the quartermaster to his captor embarking on an expedition to the fabled Fountain of Youth.
With stops to Jamaica, Haiti, Florida, the Carolinas, and an odd assortment of Caribbean blink-and-you-miss-it islands, not to mention a supporting actor/villain/antagonist role played by the most famous pirate of all--Blackbeard--On Stranger Tides proves to be a creative ride of a story that I thoroughly enjoyed. If it's not one thing happening to Chandagnac, it's another, and the leaps are as fantastical as any that made their way into Disney's adaptation. Powers has a talent for showing with subtle but colorful language that reflects end of an era at the closing of the 17th century and the birth of the 18th. Or at least it so seems to this reader, separated by several centuries from Caribbean swashbuckling in the dawn of the New World.
My only regret? That Disney would be working its limited magic to diminish the fun and fantastic that Power's pirate tale gives to the reader. It's unfortunate, and it is why I suspect that this is one book that cannot be improved by cinematography or Johnny Depp. (Spoiler alert: the book is much better than the movie).
The main character, Jack Shandy, is out to avenge his father but is distracted by a woman. Yuck. That whole “saving the damsel in distress” storyline was a distraction. The part about traveling through thick swampland to and from the Fountain of Youth was darn near hallucinogenic. The problem with that was that it seemed wrong for the book. It needed to be either expanded (my vote is expansion) or not in the book at all.
The fourth PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie is based on this book but I’ve not seen the movie. As soon as the pirate Captain Davies appears in the story I couldn’t see anyone else but Johnny Depp playing him, even though he isn’t the main character. His humor and energy made him my favorite.
I really enjoyed the book, even with its small faults, because its a good adventure story full of derring-do. It even has a very satisfying ending. Recommended for pirate enthusiasts!
And also, zombie voodoo!
How could any story with these elements not be good?
It wasn't bad, but I have to admit, I kept wishing it was better. I think, after reading both this and The Anubis
Also, the movie is based very loosely on the book.
John Chandagnac is the son of a French puppeteer, who eventually left his father's business to become an accountant with an English merchant company. He's on his way to the Caribbean to track down his uncle, Sebastian, who cheated his father of his rightful inheritance when the ship, Vociferous Carmichael, is attacked by pirates. It's not long before he's pressed into pirate service, and renamed Jack Shandy.
And not long after that, working with the most famous pirate of all: Blackbeard.
Vodun, or voodoo, magic is a big part of this story, with dire consequences for quite a few people Jack comes to care about. On his trip out, he'd met Elizabeth Hurwood and her father, Benjamin, who turns out to have really dire plans for her. Hurwood's partner in magic, Leo Friend, has his own terrible plans for Elizabeth.
So does Blackbeard.
Jack at least wants to have better plans for her.
If he can outwit three powerful magicians.
The plot takes many interesting twists and turns, and Jack finds some very unexpected use for his puppetry skills.
This is, as always with Powers, smart, well-written, creative, clever, and thoughtful. The characters keep surprising the reader in ways that are utterly plausible and convincing. Powers also never fails to do his research, giving the novel an overall depth and reality that just can't be counted on in freewheeling historical fantasy.
I loved it.
Highly recommended.
I bought this audiobook.